Many enterprises hold forth a significant presence on the web. Regardless of whether the enterprise is constituted more of bricks than clicks (or more clicks than bricks) certain functions within such enterprises often find it necessary to repeatedly perform certain online operations that are normally performed by an employee or agent using an interactive interface to access online web destinations (e.g., social media sites). Generally, no capability is provided for a user to repeatedly perform such online operations under computer-aided control. As an example, enterprises are subject to various forms of online consumer critique (e.g., via one or more social media sites). An enterprise might be the subject of criticism (whether deserved or undeserved) or praise. In the age of the Internet, an Internet posting (e.g., a post to a social media site) might “go viral” in a very short timeframe. In some cases the enterprise may regard praise as a form of modern-day word-of-mouth advertising, which is often a boon to the enterprise, and steps to proliferate the praise might be taken. Contrary-wise, criticism is generally unwanted, and can be very damaging to the enterprise, even to the point of tarnishing a brand or even to the point of preventing the enterprise from achieving corporate goals. Accordingly, some enterprises have established “watch centers” staffed with persons whose responsibility it is to monitor social media postings and to take notice of posts (whether praise or criticism), and further to take action to stop or foster proliferation, based on the sentiment of the post(s).
Such a “watch center” can be expensive to operate for the enterprise, and the repetitive operations attendant to monitoring the social media sites can become dreary for the staff of the watch center. Legacy systems have attempted to ameliorate the dreary and repetitive nature of performing repetitive operations by using macros, yet the mere playback of macros fails to address (1) the complexities attendant to effective monitoring of the social media sites, and (2) the sheer volume of posts to be processed when monitoring the social media sites.
What's needed are robust, techniques for creating and editing rules-based macros and what is needed are robust implementations of backend processes so as to accommodate rules-aware batch processes.